Reading Blackshirts & Reds and am at about 40% through the book. The amount of critique he is giving to how poorly the economic situation in the USSR was, how Stalin’s way of running things and how people were negligible about their jobs because there was no reason to be competitive or to do a good job is honestly a bit stark. Is this anti-communism or is this just good faith criticism?

  • Sickos [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
    19·
    2 months ago

    The quoted statement at the end is an explicit endorsement of the Soviet Union’s actions. Examine the rhetorical framing, stripped bare.

    Paragraph 1:

    They could:

    1. Stalinize (grr bad spooky)
    2. Liberalize (yay happy society)

    Again, assuming the reader is of liberal bent, they are coming into the work with the assumed question “why was Stalin so evil/why are those communists so authoritarian?” This paragraph exposes that question, and phrases it clearly and semi-quantifiably, laying out two possible paths of societal development.

    Paragraph 2:

    I agree with you, reader, liberal society is fun and carefree, and could have been a cool future for the Soviet Union. Unfortunately Nazis exist and were looking for weakness. The soviets chose to structure their entire society to counter the rising Nazi menace, at great individual cost. This was not evil, it was heroic.

    He’s trying to open the reader’s mind to a grander scale of thinking. One where the society matters more than the individual. One where an entire society is the hero, and citizens understood the need to sacrifice individual comfort for the benefit of the whole.